Many other food-packers know the risks of excessive dryness. Each has his own method of warding off the danger. The Geotrupes makes his home under the voluminous heap dropped by the Mule, an excellent obstacle to speedy desiccation. Besides, he works in autumn, the season of frequent showers; moreover, he gives his product the shape of a big roly-poly, of which the middle part, the only part used, gives up its moisture very slowly. For these several reasons, he digs burrows of medium depth. The Sacred Beetle likewise attaches no value to remote retreats. He houses his offspring in vaults at no great distance from the surface of the soil; but he makes amends by fashioning the victuals into a ball: he knows that round tins keep their contents moist. The Copris does very much the same with his ovoids. So with the others, the Sisyphus, [39] the Gymnopleurus. [40] The Minotaur alone takes an enormous dive underground. There are different reasons that call for this. Here is a second, more imperious even than the first. The dung-workers all go for recent materials, fully endowed with their toothsome and plastic qualities. To this system of baking the Minotaur makes a stronger exception: what he needs is old, dry, arid stuff. I have never seen him, either in my cages or in the open country, gather pellets quite recently ejected. He wants them dried by long exposure to the sun’s rays. But, to suit the grub, the hard food has to simmer for a long time and to improve by keeping, in surroundings saturated with moisture. So the coarse whole-meal bread is replaced by the bun. The laboratory in which the children’s food is prepared must therefore be a very deep-seated factory, which can never be entered by the drought of summer however long prolonged. Here succulence and flavour are imparted to dry materials which no other member of the stercoral guild thinks of employing, for lack of an annealing-chamber, of which Minotaurus possesses the monopoly. And, the better to fulfil his mission in life, he also possesses an instinct to bore to enormous depths. The nature of the victuals makes an incomparable well-sinker of the three-pronged Dung-beetle; his talents have been determined by a hard crust. CHAPTER V MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS: FIRST ATTEMPTS AT OBSERVATION Long ago, the Minotaur’s cousins, the Geotrupes, afforded me a delightfully unusual spectacle, that of a prolonged association in pairs, a real domestic couple, working in common for the children’s welfare. Philemon and Baucis, as I used to call them, prepared their board and lodging with equal ardour. Philemon, the sturdier of the two, compressed the food by pushing it with his fore-arms; Baucis explored the heap on the surface, picking out the best part and lowering by the armful the wherewithal to manufacture the enormous sausage. It was magnificent to see the mother sifting and the father compressing.